Chapter 25: Sacrifice

10th day of the 2nd moon. 296 AC. Castle Black.

One blast of the horn for returning rangers, two blasts for wildlings and three blasts for Others.

Jeor Mormont had only joined the Watch relatively recently, just before the war against the Mad King.

Angmar was well established on the other side of the Wall by then, so it was very rare to hear more than one blast of the horn.

Now he was hearing three blasts. Even with all the work being done in the Gift and New Gift, even with all the assurances that the Others were indeed coming, even with the shortening days and the worsening cold, even with the Sorcerer's ravens cawing that the Others were near, he was still surprised when the third horn blast rang from the top of the Wall.

Jeor supposed that you could never be truly prepared for something like this.

He was quick to belt on his sword and rush over to the elevator, nodding in satisfaction as he saw the men putting on armor, grabbing weapons and making their way to the top of the Wall via the stairs. They weren't all black brothers, but it was good to have the castle properly garrisoned for once. To say nothing of all the other castles along the Wall.

As much as he didn't appreciate the Sorcerer's presumption in ordering everyone around like they were his subjects, he most certainly did appreciate the amount of gold, men and resources he had invested into preparing for the Others.

The trip seemed to take far longer than usual, but Jeor knew that was just his own dread and impatience.

Finally, they arrived and Jeor wasted no time in peering out into the gloom. The sun had gone down a while ago and his eyes weren't what they used to be, but he thought that he might be able to see something moving in the darkness, as well as the occasional glimpse of glowing blue eyes.

A hand landing on his shoulder nearly made him jump out of his skin and he turned to yell at whoever thought he was being funny scaring him like that, only for his throat to close up when he saw that it was the Sorcerer himself.

The man was different from the time that Jeor had first seen him. Much taller and lacking the scars on his face. That still baffled him, but it was a mystery he was determined not to question. Trying to figure out the ways of wizards was a fool's errand.

The more pertinent mystery was what he was doing here, which he voiced.

"This is the first point of contact with the Others, although they aren't far away at any point." The wizard replied.

"You mean to say that they are attacking across the entirety of the Wall?" Jeor asking, silently horrified.

"Yes." Harry nodded. "Their numbers are concerning, both the wights and of the Others themselves. Watch."

Jeor frowned in puzzlement when the magic user brought out a strange device. I looked vaguely similar to a crossbow, if a crossbow was small enough to use in one hand and had a barrel instead of a flight groove.

He pressed the trigger and what appeared to be a bright red star flew out of the barrel, arcing through the air. It banished the darkness better than any torch and revealed that the movement he'd seen earlier was a veritable horde of shambling corpses. Just before the red star was abruptly snuffed out, Jeor thought he saw a tall figure sitting on a giant ice spider, at the edge of the tree line.

"Gods be good." He muttered in horror, blinking to clear out the afterimage from his eyes. "So many…"

"Their numbers won't matter if they can't scale the Wall." The Sorcerer said reassuringly. "And I've already collapsed the Bridge of Skulls and have my sons keeping watch to make sure they can't freeze the sea at the eastern end or the Milkwater on the western one."

Jeor shook off his fear. The Sorcerer was right, they were as prepared as could be. All that was left to do was fight.

"This cold and darkness will be our worst enemies." He said with a scowl. Even with the brazier lit nearby, he could feel the cold biting into his skin and it was damned hard to see anything.

"Here, take this." Harry said, passing him a golden sphere with a cross sticking out of the top.

"What is it?" Jeor asked curiously, turning the item over.

"Holy Hand Grenade." The Sorcerer replied with a strained grin, as if he was trying not to laugh.

"Is it like the dragonglass grenades your alchemists supplied us with?"

"Not quite, those are designed to clear out groups of wights, or preferably Others. The Holy Hand Grenade has a different purpose. See that cross at the top? That's the firing pin. If you pull it and wait for five seconds – not four, not six and definitely not seven – it will explode in a burst of Silver Fire."

Jeor very carefully kept his hands away from the cross. He had seen what had happened to one damn fool of a man that had been careless with a dragonglass grenade. It was a weapon of terrifying cruelty. "What is Silver Fire?"

"Think Wildfire, but much more powerful and much more stable. So far, it's the only kind of fire I've found that the Others haven't managed to snuff out in a matter of moments. They still cut its lifespan by half, but that gives it three hours during which it will give off a bright light, more than enough to see by."

"This will be invaluable." Jeor praised, suddenly feeling much better about the situation, although he was even more wary of holding it. "My thanks."

"Don't get carried away, though." The Sorcerer warned. "Making that stuff isn't easy and I can't supply enough to keep the entire defensive line lit up all night, every night. Only use it if the Others themselves are pressing the attack."

"Understood." The Old Bear nodded firmly. He was used to rationing supplies and this would be no different. That they had such a thing available to begin with was an unlooked for blessing.

"Good, now I have to go check the other castles. Keep an eye out for any unusual behavior, I'm not quite willing to assume that they're going to just mindlessly throw themselves at the Wall."

And with that, the Sorcerer seemed to vanish into thin air, leaving Jeor to look out into the lands beyond the Wall again. His eyesight was returning now and he could once again see the wights shambling in the darkness and occasionally glimpsing a pair of glowing blue eyes in the distance.

He clenching his fist around the base of the Holy Hand Grenade, resisting the urge to lob it over immediately.

He had thought that stockpiling thousands upon thousands of dragonglass-tipped arrows and crossbow bolts along with hundreds of those dragonglass grenades and 'grapeshot bombs' had been excessive. Now he just hoped it would be enough.

XXXXX

Harry deeply regretted….not being able to go through the whole Holy Hand Grenade spiel. The one time he'd tried it, all he'd gotten was baffled looks and he'd ended up needing to explain the whole thing all over again, which completely ruined the joke.

He also regretted having to jump all across the Wall to monitor the situation. It was tedious, exhausting and didn't end up telling him much.

Contrary to his expectation, the Others did in fact just mindlessly send their minions charging at the Wall. At least at first. It was as if they'd never been faced with an obstacle that they couldn't just swarm over before.

That was entirely plausible, actually, and would have boded well for the future if the damn things didn't wise up when it became clear that zombies weren't very good at climbing up sheer icy surfaces, nor could they simply clamber over each other to reach the top.

After abandoning that futile effort, the Others had directed their minions to start simply piling up crap in front of the Wall into the beginnings of a makeshift ramp. Given that there were hundreds of thousands of wights there to haul snow, ice, wood and rock for this purpose that could eventually become a problem.

Eventually, because the Others hated the sun and retreated deeper into the Haunted Forest come morning, at which point men could simply sally forth and wreck their progress.

Not to self, make explosives. Harry thought, knowing that the back and forth would inevitably turn into the favor of the Others simply because they'd block off the gates. Explosives, however, could be chucked off the top of the Wall and collapse the whole thing.

Thankfully, the Others didn't seem to grasp the concept of 'structural integrity'. Nor could they prevent bombs from going off the way they smothered any fire or magic that got near them, especially if the bomb was housed in an obsidian shell.

Given what he had seen of their efforts so far, he was cautiously optimistic about that front. The Wall was an insanely good defensive position from both a magical and mundane standpoint and the way it forced them to clump together instead of their usual disorganized spread was practically begging for liberal use of grapeshot and various shrapnel weaponry.

It was certainly a far safer and more efficient option than hunting them down one by one in enemy Territory (capital T), in the dark (because they burrowed under the snow like friggin moles during the day), while they had the cover of the Haunted Forest. And that was not even accounting for any surprises he had yet to find out about.

The only niggle of concern he still had about the Others were their numbers. He had expected that they were small in number, perhaps a few hundred at most, but that assumption seemed to be in error. It was hard to get a good estimate given how scattered they were, but he would lowball it to actually be somewhere in the thousands.

Once enough of them plodded over to the Wall, the defenders would have to worry about return fire. The Wall may be over two hundred meters high, but the icy bastards had already proven to be strong enough to throw spears higher than that.

Ah well, that would be a concern for the castle commanders. They were all smart and competent men, they'd handle it. In the meanwhile, he could focus on making more explody toys and keeping an eye on other concerns.

XXXXX

14th day of the 3rd moon, 296 AC. Iron Islands, Pyke.

Rodrik Greyjoy, Lord Reaper of Pyke, was a very angry man. He had, in fact, been angry for so long that he scarcely remembered what it was like to not be angry.

He had always had a temper, but it was not until the Storm God's chosen murdered his father and two of his uncles that rage had become a constant companion.

It got worse when the rest of Westeros insulted the Ironborn so blatantly. While he did not believe that the Others were truly attacking, nor would he have cared if they did, to be told that they were to stay at home and 'behave themselves' while everyone else went off to fight? That could not be borne.

Fortunately, the foundation of his revenge had been laid down by his father and he had finished it. The Iron Fleet was stronger than ever and ready to sail.

"Dagmer, call the captains." He commanded to House Greyjoy's master-at-arms. "We sail and reave."

"Aye, my lord." The old raider grinned, stretching the hideous scar that had earned him the name of 'Cleftjaw'.

Rodrik smiled grimly, but then his expression soured into a scowl when the ravens started.

The blasted birds lurked everywhere on the Iron Islands these days. A more ignorant man would dismiss the birds as irrelevant, but not Rodrik. Oh no, he knew that ravens were the Storm God's creatures, his spies and messengers.

Their foe would know they were coming. Bah, let him know and tremble. The Ironborn would rise to take their rightful place in the world once again, and with the Drowned God on their side, not even the eternal enemy or his chosen avatar would stop them.

XXXXX

5th day of the 4th moon, 296 AC. The North, the Stony Shore.

Stonewolf was a brand new castle, and named rather uninspiringly in Harry's none too humble opinion. This was the place where his granddaughter and her Stark husband had set themselves up.

The only reason that the Starks even had the ability to give a third son his own lands and keep, ones that would one day enable this cadet branch of House Stark to become a major power in the North, was because of the glass trade that they had learned from Angmar. Without it, they could never have scraped together the funds for such an ambitious project.

Of course, it helped that Luna had expedited much of the castle's construction magically as a wedding gift while Harry had been indisposed on the Astral Plane.

Since then, Gerd and Benjen had been hard at work to make the best of the opportunity and had actually made some fairly good progress in putting the land to the plow, establishing a fishing fleet, getting started on maritime trade, bringing in people, rooting out bandits and so on.

But a mere decade was nowhere near enough time to bring the place to its full potential, or even to make it truly defensible if the Ironborn got any ideas about raiding it, which they had.

"I know you said it would not be needed, but I do not feel comfortable leaving the smallfolk undefended." Benjen said.

"Trust Grandfather." Gerd chimed in, much more relaxed. Her belly was rounded with the telltale sign of an incoming child, their fourth. "Those stinking pirates will never reach the shore."

"Indeed they won't." Harry smirked, bringing out one of his experimental weapons. He'd found the need to get back to the drawing board after the Others had completely no-selled his magic.

"What is that?" Benjen asked curiously.

"This…" Harry said smugly, slapping a hand against the weapon. "is my magical railgun."

It was rather simple in appearance, just a rifle stock connected to an almost comically huge barrel, but that belied the complexity of its spellwork. It had been quite the finicky project to create spell array that would first 'stick' the ammo to the back and then generate enough repulsive power to be useful when it was fired, combine it with runecraft to nullify that pesky concept of mass inside the barrel and then make the whole thing reusable.

It had ostensibly been made to fire obsidian shards with the intent of absolutely shredding any wights or bullshit magic-canceling ice liches it was used against, but it could also be loaded with just about anything. In this particular case, solid iron cannonballs.

The lack of specialized ammo unfortunately meant that it had to be a muzzle loader, but at least there was no need to pour in gunpowder and it wasn't like the enemy was going to get a chance to return fire at the ranges he planned to use it.

He could have tested it out elsewhere, like at Lannisport or Seagard or the Shield Islands or the Arbor, but those places were heavily fortified already. He'd given them a warning about the impending attack and called it a day. Unless they were criminally incompetent, then the respective lords there should be able to handle it.

Plus, none of those places had his granddaughter or her kids living in it.

Harry lowered the giant gun stock-first to the ground and unceremoniously dropped the cannonball inside, then lifted it back up and rested it against the tower's crenellations.

"What does it do?" Gerd asked curiously.

"It wrecks things." He grinned using the attached scope to aim at the distant ships. The Ironborn thought they were being cute by attacking just before dawn, as if he didn't have ravens tracking every single ship that had left their islands.

The ships were still a fair distance away from the shoreline and Harry wasn't altogether certain what kind of range his new toy had, so he let them come a little closer.

When they were about four hundred meters away, he aimed down the sights and charged the spell array. A moment later, the iron cannonball rocketed out of the barrel at speeds exceeding what an actual cannon could achieve, thanks to the fact that the cannonball was massless at the moment of launch.

Unfortunately, Harry had miscalculated the effects of gravity and wind resistance afterwards, so his shot hit the water in front of the ship. The lack of recoil or trigger was also rather unsatisfying, but what can you do.

"A little higher." He said to himself and reloaded, ignoring the curious gazes of hid granddaughter and her husband.

The Ironborn ships had obviously seen the splash of water when the cannonball hit the surface and were scattering, but that wasn't going to help them much. Indeed, all it did was expose their broadside and make them easier to hit.

The next cannonball hit dead center on the leading ship, smashing through the wood with ease. It wasn't necessarily fatal damage, but if he had his angles right, then the 'exit wound' was below the water surface, so unless they could patch it up real fast they were going to sink soon.

"What a powerful weapon." Benjen said in subdued awe. No doubt seeing a handheld weapon powerful enough to damage a ship at ranges greater than a trebuchet came as quite a shock to him. "Did your homeland use such?"

Gerd had shared with him her grandfather wasn't native to Westeros, a non-secret that was generally unknown.

"Not exactly, this one is my own design." Harry replied absently, putting a hole in another ship. "Similar principle though, minus the magic."

It took about twenty minutes all in all to sink the small fleet of ships, and one of them managed to get away. Just like most medieval pirates and sailors, Ironborn tended to have some silly superstitious ideas about learning how to swim, so they drowned in short order. Those few who did know how to swim weren't much better off with how cold the water was. There were no survivors.

"Are you going to chase after the last ship?" Gerd asked.

"No, let them report this disaster to Greyjoy." Harry dismissed. "If he has any sense he won't send any more, and if not then I'll be happy to put them on the fast lane towards their Drowned God."

"What is a fast lane?" Benjen asked, confused.

"A lane that is fast." Harry answered unhelpfully.

XXXXX

9th day of the 4th moon, 296 AC. The Wall, Rimegate.

The unusually large raven spread its wings wide to catch the air, talons extended graspingly towards the shoulder of the equally unusually large woman.

It landed with grace born of much practice and folded its wings back, standing imperiously upon its perch.

"Good evening, Dear." Luna greeted warmly. "How did it go?"

"Swimmingly." Blackbeak the Raven punned.

"Was anyone hurt?" The witch asked.

"No one important."

Luna nodded, accepting the answer.

The men around the castle watched on in bafflement as the Witch-Queen of Angmar conversed with a bird, but then shrugged and went on with their lives. It was better not to ponder the oddities of magic users.

Harry stayed in the form of Blackbeak as his wife walked through the halls of Rimegate, feeling no particular need to assume human form just yet. Some of the servants and passing guardsmen looked at them oddly, but Luna was a familiar sight all along the Wall so no one questioned it unduly.

It took no more than a few minutes before they arrived at the commander's quarters and Luna simply walked in without bothering to knock.

"Good evening." She greeted cheerfully, ignoring the surprised yelp of the woman. It was only natural to be surprised if you were interrupted mid-coitus.

"Good evening, Luna." Oberyn replied with a grin. "Would you like to join us?"

"Nevermore!" Blackbeak croaked.

"The raven has spoken." Luna nodded sagely.

Oberyn sighed in overplayed disappointment. "Curses." He then turned to the increasingly confused woman still in his bed. "I am afraid we will have to cut this short."

"Of course, my prince." She acknowledged far too professionally to be anything other than a whore, quickly gathering up her clothes and slipping them on.

"Say hello to Adrastia for me." Luna said to the whore as she walked past, getting only a wry nod in response.

Oberyn had notably not gotten dressed yet and continued to lounge naked on the bed, directing a hopeful look at them. "I don't suppose you just wanted me all to yourself?"

Harry hopped off Luna's shoulder and transformed mid-jump, landing heavily on the stone floor. "You put out too easily, Oberyn."

"So you are saying that you would be more interested if I played hard-to-get?" The Dornishman grinned, finally starting to get dressed.

"Yes." Harry lied.

Oberyn paused, absently belting on his pants, and gave him a scrutinizing look. "I think you are lying and this is merely an attempt to make me stop seducing you."

"No, it's definitely the truth." Harry lied again, resisting the urge to correct the other man's choice of words. It wasn't seduction if it failed consistently, it was an attempted seduction.

"Luna, is your husband lying?" The Red Viper attacked from an angle.

"Yes." Luna nodded.

"I am betrayed." Harry drolled, not terribly surprised. Luna was entirely too honest sometimes.

"So am I." Oberyn bemoaned. "How can I ever trust you again when you would casually utter such falsehoods?"

"We can share bowl of pudding!" Luna chimed in helpfully, presenting said treat along with three spoons.

"And the jape is ruined." The Dornishman shook his head with a wry grin. "Is there a reason for this visit or did you simply miss my charming company?"

"Mostly just checking in to see how you're holding up and if you're running low on any supplies." Harry admitted as they all sat around the table.

"Aside from the Holy Hand Grenades, we still have plenty of everything." Oberyn assured. "The Others look for weaknesses along the Wall, but we have so many men and supplies that fighting them off is fairly easy. Seeing them in the dark and keeping the men warm have remained our greatest challenges. We have managed so far,…"

"But?" Harry prompted at the trailed off sentence.

"The days are getting shorter, and colder." Oberyn admitted. "There are perhaps six or so hours of sunlight left, the rest is a gloomy twilight. My studies of astronomy as the Citadel did not speak of this. I know that the days are always shorter in winter, but this feels…unnatural."

"It is unnatural." Harry nodded, appreciating the Dornishman's perceptiveness. With his lechery and generally reckless lifestyle, it was easy to forget that Oberyn was actually very smart. "The Others are twisting the world to suit their preferences. Fortunately, the Wall seems to have stymied their advance, but it will likely get worse before it gets better."

"Perhaps the Night King will show himself and you can slay him." Oberyn mused.

"Honestly, I'm not sure the Night King exists or has ever existed." Harry snorted. "People like to project their own views, but nothing I've seen of the Others so far makes me think that the Night King is real. Or if he is, he is most likely to be a spiritual entity rather than a physical one."

Harry did not share his growing suspicion that there was another monolithic block of the mysterious black stone buried beneath the ice somewhere in the Lands of Always Winter, and that the Others were merely a manifestation of its influence. He did not share that he feared the fight was hopeless unless he could figure out a way to strike at the source.

"I shall defer to your expertise on the matter." Oberyn conceded with a sigh. "But it does make our situation more complicated. Even as they lose wights, the number of Others only continues to swell."

"I'll stop by and clear them up when I can." Harry replied, knowing that his railgun would make quick work of the icy bastards.

"That will help, but I do implore you to make haste with whatever you are doing."

"Will do." And hopefully he wouldn't have to resort to some of his more desperate contingency plans. Sacrificial rituals with a permanent, irrevocable cost were bad enough when you weren't immortal.

XXXXX

7th day of the 6th moon, 296 AC. The North, Stony Shore.

There was so much to keep an eye on and so much to do in so many places, that Harry's ravens could not reliably reach him when they had news. Moreover, even if he could have stayed in a single place on a more constant basis, they might take too long.

To counter this problem, a checkpoint system had been implemented. Certain locations across Westeros where people had been entrusted with a communication mirror so that they could relay information. It wasn't always a place where his children lived and not all of his descendants had inherited the full scope of his ability to speak to corvid bird species, but his birds were clever. They would be able to get enough across to make their point.

As it happened, when the first emergency popped up, there was no need to interpret a raven's croaked words.

"Grandfather!" Gerd shouted at him from the mirror, her eyes wild. "We need you, Stonewolf is being attacked by monsters!"

Harry blinked. Monsters? The fuck?

Putting the ever-burning questions of how and why aside for the moment, he focused and prepared to apparate. Stonewolf was a vast distance away, much, much farther than an average wizard would consider it safe to apparate to, but he had been doing 'unsafe' things with magic his whole life. It just took the proper preparation and mental focus.

His arrival was heralded by a thunderous crack of displaced air, briefly drawing attention from the frantically rushing men and causing the awaiting Gerd and Benjen to jump in fright.

Barely sparing them a glance, Harry looked over the walls and blinked incredulously.

"Holy shit, you really are being attacked by monsters!"

Fish monsters to be precise. Slimy, scaled, finned, bipedal. Some looked like humanoid fish, some had crustacean features, others were distinctly…squiddy. All were incredibly ugly and looked like extras from a Lovecraft-inspired pirate movie.

An impression reinforced by the soggy, rusted remains of Ironborn gear they had on them.

Harry immediately realized that letting the fuckers drown two months ago had been a mistake. He should have let them get ashore and killed them there, possibly given them a sky burial atop a mountain just to be on the safe side.

"They came in the night and attacked without warning." Benjen hollered an explanation, firing arrows over the wall. "Many of the smallfolk in the town were slaughtered before we could get them behind the walls. We also saw them dragging people off towards the sea."

Said town was still fairly new and small, but the number of casualties from an attack like this would not be negligible. More worrisome was that second sentence. Dragging people off to drown them had all sorts of unpleasant implications given the current situation.

They needed to die quickly.

"Back away from the walls!" Harry called, enhancing his voice with a quick Sonorous.

He didn't check to see if they were obeying, already weaving one of his more dangerous spells. A ball of fire took shape between his hands, starting off with its normal golden orange tint before darkening to a distinctly malicious red. Another component more commonly used in a Chain Lightning spell and it was ready.

"Epidemic of Fire." He intoned and tossed it at one of the fish monsters clawing at the walls.

The fire jumped towards its target with a glee usually reserved for particularly rabid wolverines. The dark curse he'd weaved into it made it cling to the skin more effectively than napalm, devouring life to fuel itself. Then it split off and jumped at the closest source of food, repeating the process. It wasn't long before a line of burning corpses lined the base of the wall.

Harry was glad to see that his magic was working. If he ran into yet another enemy that completely no-selled it, he would have been very upset.

However….it wasn't as effective as it should be. If he'd used this spell against an army of humans, the spread would have been much more rapid. These freaky fish things had some magic resistance. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they were too alien for the spell's parameters to function properly.

Yes…He could see that the cursed fire wasn't getting enough power to keep going indefinitely. These things were either just too different or not sufficiently 'alive' to serve as proper fuel, possibly both.

The heavy smell of rot from all the burned corpses certainly hinted at there being some necromantic fuckery involved. And didn't the Ironborn constantly talk about how 'what is dead may never die'?

Well, whatever. Even if the Epidemic of Fire hadn't turned out to be the army killer it was supposed to be, it had still done plenty of damage. And the fishy freaks had paused in their assault, looking cautious now, which indicated more intelligence than Harry would have preferred they have.

Not that it would help them right now, but intelligence in the enemy was always a bad thing.

Harry brought out his recently created magical railgun, quickly loaded it with obsidian shards and aimed at the biggest group.

It was even more effective than he'd imagined. Some of the armored fish things – either with metal or organic shells – managed to survive by pure chance, but all the others got shredded by the razor sharp barrage.

Two more shots and they abandoned their siege, fleeing back to the sea.

"Benjen!" Harry called out, snapping the slightly shellshocked man out of his gawking (although he did manage to pull off an impressively passive face while he was doing it).

"Yes?" The Stark stood up straight in readiness.

"When you're disposing of the bodies, save some for me." The wizard instructed. "One of each type if possible."

"You…want the bodies of these creatures?" Benjen repeated in obvious surprise. "Why?"

"For study, obviously." Harry rolled his eyes. "I need to figure out what the hell is going on here and I need to do it fast. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go check on Lannisport in case they're also being attacked."

He apparated away without giving the man a chance to respond.

XXXXX

Lannisport was indeed being attacked, and far more vigorously than Stonewolf had been at that. The city was burning, there were people screaming, running, fighting and dying everywhere.

Looks like they were caught with their pants down, unsurprising considering that the Drowned must have crawled out of the sea without any kind of warning.

Harry quickly mounted his Disc and set himself to helping. He wasn't able to use anything too devastating in the close confines of the urban environment, but he was still able to give the defending Westermen a hand. Arguably, the morale boost of seeing him killing the fish monsters did more work than his magic.

He also saw the truth of Benjen's words from earlier. The Drowned were dragging people off to the sea and he had a bad feeling that it wasn't merely to increase their numbers, even though some of them were wearing Lannister colors.

In which case, the entire western coastline would probably have to be abandoned. Joy.

"You want me to what?" Tywin Lannister asked in disbelief after the fighting was done.

He was not normally a man to express such obvious shock, but the ludicrous suggestion that the Sorcerer had just given him merited it.

"Evacuate Lannistport, abandon the coasts." Harry repeated succintly. "These creatures will always have the element of surprise and I'm just one man, I can't guard the entire western shore by myself."

"We will guard it ourselves." Tywin retorted stiffly. "House Lannister has held these lands for eight thousand years, we will not give them up now."

Lannisport was one of Westeros' largest cities and ports. To abandon it would be a huge hit to his family's wealth and prestige, to say nothing of the embarrassment of leaving behind their castle. House Lannister might never recover if he did that!

Harry could see that nothing he said would budge the stubborn old goat, but he had to try one more time.

"You know, I was looking into the Drowned God decades ago." He began. "I murdered one of its priests and held his soul captive to see what would happen."

In spite of himself, Tywin was interested, so he did not interrupt.

"The watery bastard got really upset with me for that and told me off, then it sent a giant kraken after me, big enough to snap a galleon in half. Given what happened today, I wouldn't be surprised if more of the things started showing up. How are you going to deal with one of those?"

While unable to dismiss it out of hand, given what he had seen today, Tywin refused to trust the word of the Sorcerer on this. The man had already proven that he was no ally to House Lannister.

"We will manage."

Harry sighed in exasperation at the stubbornness. He didn't have time to be playing this game. "Then you'd better start fortifying the harbor fast."

"I intend to." Tywin's tone grew stiffer still, insulted that the wizard thought he needed advice on how to defend his own lands.

"Alright, then I'm off to see if Seagard and the Reach are having fish trouble, too."

XXXXX

8th day of the 6th moon, 296 AC. Dorne, Sunspear.

All the other places where the Ironborn had tried to attack had indeed been experiencing fish trouble of their own, but only those places. That made it easy to surmise that the recently drowned Ironborn had returned from their watery death to make pests of themselves once more.

Tywin Lannister unfortunately proved to be the norm for once, as none of the other coastal lords wanted to evacuate their people either. There were many reasons for this, but they didn't ultimately matter. Whether it be greed, pride, arrogance or disbelief, the bottom line was that they were leaving out a whole lot of snacks for the Drowned God and he simply didn't have time to ride herd on every stubborn idiot.

He would get Adrastia to do it instead.

In the meanwhile, there were dissections to be made.

"The first thing to watch out for when performing an autopsy on the unknown is safety." Harry lectured to his apprentice as he put on a custom-made breathing mask. "Because you never know when something dangerous is going to squirt out of the corpse."

"Is this really necessary?" Sarella asked squeamishly, putting her own mask on with a great deal more reluctance.

"Maybe, maybe not." He shrugged, donning the plastic goggles and finally the tough latex gloves, all made with alchemy. "But better that we do something unnecessary now than lament not doing something necessary later."

"I suppose." She conceded, putting on the rest of her own protective gear.

"Good, now would you be so kind as to pass me the bone saw?"

Sarella wasn't entirely sure which of the unnervingly featureless silver surgical instruments the bone saw was, but she made an educated guess that it was the one with the long, serrated blade.

Fortunately it was the correct guess and her master only nodded approvingly before directing her attention to the body laid out on the operating table. It was a dark greenish-grey, with a face reminiscent of an angler fish and finned limbs tipped with claws.

"Now watch closely."

Harry stretched out an arm and began sawing away at it just under the elbow.

Sarella had to fight down a retch at the sight and sound of the blade cutting through skin and muscle, but didn't look away. At least the masks blocked out the smell.

"The tissue has a rubbery texture and is harder to saw through than it should be." He grunted, putting more force into his movements. "Necromancy often confers a resistance to mundane implements and this seems to be the case here as well. Both slashing and blunt weapons will have reduced effectiveness."

He finally hit the bone and had to really work the saw to make it through.

"It's not bleeding." Sarella noted.

"Well spotted." Harry praised, lifting up the severed arm. "Corpses in general don't bleed much because the heart no longer pumps blood through the body, but this thing doesn't even have any proper blood left."

To prove his point, he tipped the arm over so that the severed end was pointing at the ground and then squeezed it like it was a tube of toothpaste. The only thing that came out was some kind of disgusting, oily black ichor.

Sarella felt her stomach rebel again and looked away until it settled.

"Hand me the scalpel, will you? We're opening up the chest."

The most intellectually-inclined of the Sand Snakes despaired. Being taken as Harry's apprentice was easily the best thing to have ever happened to her, but this was definitely one of those occasions where she wished that he would treat her with the benevolent condescension that so many men adopted towards women.

But she didn't complain, or sigh, or ask to be excused and handed him the scalpel instead. The apprentice shouldn't whine about what the master was teaching, not if they wanted to keep their position. Sarella had at one point been contemplating dressing up as a boy just so that she could go study at the Citadel, a little gore wouldn't stop her.

"Hmm, as expected, the digestive tract is completely withered." Harry hummed noncommittally, pulling out a length of ropey intestine. It was slimy, grey and absolutely disgusting.

There was no keeping her breakfast down this time and she had to run out of the room to expel it.

Yes, this wouldn't stop her, but it would certainly be unpleasant.

XXXXX

9th day of the 6th moon, 296 AC. Iron Islands.

"This…might be a problem." Harry concluded, watching the Drowned lead a procession of Ironborn towards the sea. At some point during the dissections of the mutant fish monsters, it had occurred to him that he should take a peek at the Iron Islands to see what was going on, and he found this.

Some were being led at sword point, but many others were doing so willingly. No doubt the priests of the Drowned God had seen the mutant fish monsters their sailors had turned into and come to certain conclusions.

Conclusions such as 'the Drowned God demands that all his worshipers return to him'.

This was a pickle, because when it came to an Ironborn genocide, Harry had always expected to be on the side causing it.

To be fair, genocide was still – theoretically – a viable solution to the problem. If he could kill off all the remaining Ironborn before they could drown themselves and feed their god, then they'd be golden. Unfortunately, even he couldn't kill people fast enough to manage that. Not even close.

A proper genocide was more than just extended mass murder, after all, and the Iron Islands were too big for one man to purge with such a brutish method.

Without something on the level of a nuclear bomb, he simply lacked the widespread killing power to take out a significant chunk of the Ironborn population before they threw themselves into the sea. Even if he'd become aware of it the very moment it started, it wouldn't have made much difference, because this wasn't a technologically advanced society where people congregated in massive cities, but were instead dispersed across innumerable small villages.

So here Harry sat, in the sky upon his Disc, and pondered what he could do about this. Truth be told, he was getting pretty fucking tired of playing defense.

It made sense with the pseudo-sentient mass of darkness in the Shadow Lands – he couldn't even get at the true cause of that thing and fighting the symptoms was about as useful as putting band aids on stab wounds.

It made sense with the Others – without an easy way to kill them en masse, fighting them on ground that favored them would be a stupid idea. Even if it didn't get him killed, his kids wouldn't be so fortunate. To say nothing of how pointless it would be if his suspicions about them being another manifestation of the black stone was true.

Now the fragging Ironborn had turned from a mild inconvenience into yet another problem that he couldn't cut off at the source.

Harry was noticing a trend.

Screaming from below snapped him out of his contemplation. What did the damn pirates have to be screaming about? They'd just been walking into the sea like a bunch of lemmings! Fear seemed a bit redundant if you were going to kill yourself anyway.

The sea was churning, a dark whirpool just off the coast, like the maw of a gigantic beast.

"Wait, that is the maw of a gigantic beast." Harry realized, raising an eyebrow as he spotted massive hooked teeth beneath the water. "Don't be a kraken cliché, please don't be a kraken cliché aaaand it's a kraken. I don't know what I was expecting."

The huge aquatic monstrosity raised itself beneath the waves, easily as big as Grigori was these days, if not bigger, and that was before accounting for the part of it that was underwater. A lake's worth of water flowed down the dark scales of its sinuous, serpentine body, setting off giant ripples in the surrounding sea. Tentacles rose up around it, wiggling menacingly.

It looked right at him eyes set so deep into its skull that he could barely make them out, even though they glowed with an ominous blue light, but he had no trouble sensing the truly breathtaking hostility it was directing at him.

Harry knew immediately that it had appeared here because of him.

The Kraken let out a gurgling, watery roar, the tentacles around its mouth spread apart, each at least two dozen meters long. The sound itself felt like the spiritual equivalent of getting toothpicks jammed under your fingernails. It was extremely unpleasant, to say the least.

Harry had only just finished coming out of his cringe-induced, full body shudder at the horrible sensation when he noticed that it was getting dark.

"Eh? Oh, you cannot actually be serious."

The sun was darkening, as if it was a solar eclipse. Except it couldn't be a solar eclipse because the moon was nowhere close to the right position.

"What the hell, world?" Harry spoke to the planet with a tone of distinct irritation. "You start off as magical suburbia, now you're throwing giant monsters and casual large scale reality alterations my way? Show some fucking consistency!"

Although he had taken his eyes off the Kraken to look at the not-eclipse, it didn't escape his attention when the god-monster started doing something. A creature of such colossal size was never going to pull off a sneak attack.

In this case, it appeared to be taking a deep breath.

Harry had seen too many dragons do the same thing to be caught off guard and threw himself sideways with his Disc without hesitation. Just in time, too, as the Kraken launched a veritable river of compressed water at him. The force and speed of it was such that it could be called a beam without sounding ridiculous, it would probably drill through a mountain if it hit one. Instead, it pierced the sky, travelling for several kilometers before losing cohesion and falling down to the ground in a torrential, albeit salty, downpour.

"Alright, you wanna go? Let's go." While this wasn't a fight he would usually pick, at this point he was just glad that he had an enemy he could actually strike at.

Most of the spells in his arsenal were immediately rejected as useless. Even if the Kraken somehow didn't have magic resistance up the wazoo, it was just too damn big to be unduly affected by anything except the most egregiously powerful spells.

Fortunately, he always carried a few vials of Silver Fire on hand in case he ran into anything that was especially hard to kill. Targeting the big bastard would be deceptively hard, since Harry didn't dare get close enough to accurately throw the vial at it, but unlike the Others this one didn't seem to have a magical territory around him, so a homing spell should work just fine.

Harry quickly enchanted the vial and then juked sideways to avoid another attempt to pulverize him with water. At the same time he also tossed the vial, sending it curving towards the Kraken.

It struck the beast's neck and ignited with its characteristic blinding silver flame. The Kraken immediately began roaring in pain, the sound even more unpleasant than before, but he had at least braced for it.

Harry watched it burn, not relaxing as of yet. Theoretically, nothing should be capable of extinguishing that fire, but the Others had already shown that they could diminish it with their presence. If this was enough, it would have felt a little too easy.

Sure enough, the Kraken submerged itself beneath the choppy sea. The Silver Fire still burned, flash-boiling the water around it. The heat visibly spread, steam rising from the bubbling surface. If there were any fish in the area they would probably have been cooked by now.

But the Silver Fire visibly diminished, even though it shouldn't.

"Feh, so your Territory is beneath the water." Harry scoffed. "Figures."

There was a moment of silence, which then got interrupted by the nearby Ironborn. For some reason, the idiots were still there… Ah, of course. Their priests were shouting prayers at the sea. Superstitious as they were, they probably thought they were seeing a battle between the Drowned God and the Storm God.

Oh…that was an idea.

Harry began chanting a spell in the True Tongue. His words were the rumble of thunder and the howl of the wind as dark clouds gathered in the sky, obscuring the blackened sun.

Doing this was so much easier than it used to be.

Early on in his life, he would have needed to first create the conditions for a storm to form and then accelerate the process. It was workable, but inelegant.

Now he was effectively just pulling on a minor strand in the planet's world-soul. The potential for the storm was always there, it just needed a small nudge to show up. And it had become even easier since his pseudo-ascension, after his own soul had briefly been submerged in the whole.

The Kraken surfaced again, now with a big path of blackened and burned flesh on its neck. The sea around it boiled from the heat of the Silver Fire, but it seemed unbothered.

Harry met its otherworldly glare with a thin smirk, pleased by the damage he had done. It took a deep breath and Harry spoke another verse in the True Tongue, directed the lightning to strike.

The blinding fork of power struck it right in the head, causing the Kraken to roar in pain, but it shook off even that devastating attack and retaliated with another incomprehensibly powerful stream of water. Harry dodged and directed another bolt of lightning at it.

That set the pattern between them for the rest of the fight. While the Kraken was easily the most powerful thing he had ever faced, it had zero mobility and no way to counter his flight advantage. Had he been forced to fight from the ground, things would have been far more dicey.

In spite of that, the Kraken still endured close to twenty minutes of being struck by lightning before it gave a final enraged shriek and vanished beneath the sea.

Which, now that he thought about it, should not have been deep enough this close to the coast to accommodate something so colossally huge. It just further underlined the point that things were getting out of hand and that he couldn't dawdle much longer.

Harry had some thinking to do.

XXXXX

Later at night on that same day. Dorne, Sunspear.

Brooding was something that Harry always had a penchant for. The women he was involved with, whether they be wives, mistresses or something else, invariably learned to pull him out of it when he got like this.

Oddly enough, it wasn't any of them that interrupted him this time.

"You have been glaring at the sea all day." Doran Martell commented. "My guards are perturbed."

Harry glanced at the man that was kinda-sorta (but not really) his father-in-law and snorted. "What do you want, Doran?

He was in no mood to play around, or even be polite.

"Something vexes you." The lord stated. "You are not a man easily vexed."

"You don't say?" Harry drawled sarcastically.

"It is concerning." Doran continued, unperturbed. He, more than most men, had learned how to deal with an immortal wizard's quirks. "I have found that discussing especially vexing problems sometimes reveals a solution."

"My 'vexing problem' is that my magic is useless against things I don't understand and I don't understand the black stone at all. It's something outside mortal logic, My 'vexing problem' is that even if I did understand it, it's becoming clear that it's only a physical manifestation of a phantasmal phenomenon. My 'vexing problem' is that I simply cannot see my 'vexing problem'!" Harry ground out in frustration.

Normally he wouldn't bother talking about this to someone who didn't know anything about magic, but he was too pissed to care who he was unloading on right now.

"Legends say that the black stone fell from the sky in the Great Empire of the Dawn after the Bloodstone Emperor murdered his sister, usurped the throne and cast down their gods. Perhaps it is a curse cast upon mankind for our sins."

"I know, but I have only one way to check." Harry clenched his fists and glared harder.

Doran startled at the unexpected answer, but he did not immediately reply, choosing instead to consider the words.

"I take it that your method of verifying the legend is not palatable?" He ventured.

"I can only do it once and doing so will cost me dearly. If the knowledge I gain isn't useful, then I will have sacrificed something precious and gained nothing."

That was the whole reason why he hadn't done it already, a fading hope that it would turn out to be unnecessary. Or, failing that, making sure that the sacrifice didn't go to waste.

"I am a cautious man by nature, not one to gamble or take risks." The lord admitted in turn. "In your place, I too would hesitate at such a decision."

A cautious man indeed, cautious enough to not directly encourage another man to take a dangerous risk.

Not that he needed to. Harry had already decided to do it, he just wasn't happy about it, hence his glaring at the sea.

XXXXX

14th day of the 6th moon, 296 AC. Dorne, Sunspear.

Harry had been acting strange for the past few days.

They might not see as much of each other as Luna would have liked due to the present circumstances, but she knew her husband. He was acting weird, sentimental weird.

Harry didn't do sentimental. Usually it was her job to get him to smell the roses, but he'd been doing that one his own for the past few days. And not just smelling the roses, he'd also been visiting people and having a little small talk with them.

Harry loathed small talk. He'd rather be quiet and enjoy people's awkwardness than engage in small talk.

That was why Luna knew that he was intending to do something big and probably dangerous. He'd been cagey about it so far, but she wasn't going to let herself be placated again!

He was standing on Sunspear's battlements again, watching the sunset with a wistful smile on his face. That was another reason to be alarmed. Harry only got wistful when something big was going on.

"Harry!" She called out, jogging over to him and grabbing him into a hug.

"Luna." He replied, returning the hug. "Busy day?"

"I got into a bar fight." Luna reported cheerily.

"You got into a bar fight?" Harry's eyebrows shot upwards in surprise.

"Well, it started with arm wrestling contest." She admitted. "I was just there to check if the tavern had everything they needed when I saw a group of Angmari competing against a group of Westerlanders."

"Uh huh." Harry nodded with a small smile, prompting her to continue.

"Grom was with the Angmari and asked if I wanted to join in." Grom being one of Harry's grandsons from Hala's line.

"And the Westerlanders protested." He concluded.

"Oh yes." Luna nodded. "One of them said that I would use magic to cheat, another asked if they needed a woman to help them and their leader, I think they called him the Strongboar said that it wasn't something a lady should be doing."

"And then my grandson and his men got pissy." Harry guessed some more.

"Very." Luna confirmed. "I didn't see who threw the first punch, but pretty soon everyone was fighting. That Strongboar fellow tried to escort me out of the tavern, but Grom took offense to that and tackled him to the floor. The boys looked like they were having fun, so I left them to it and just made sure nobody pulled a knife."

"Ah, so you weren't exactly in a bar fight, you were mediating a bar fight." Harry nodded to himself.

"Well, the bar fight was happening around me, so I was inside it, but yes."

"Who won?"

"Everyone wins when you're having fun, although they all looked sulky later when I made them sit down so I could fix up their booboos."

"Right." He grinned, obviously amused.

"What about you?" She asked, staring him in the eye. "What have you been doing the past few days."

Harry's smile faded and a soft expression came onto his face. He took her face in his hands and gave her a gentle kiss on the lips.

"Nothing gets past you, huh?"

"You've been acting like you're about to die, but I know that can't be it because you promised you wouldn't do that without me and you would never break your promise." Luna informed him. "It's a mystery and I want in on it."

"I'm not going to die." Harry said, still smiling softly. "But I am going to be doing a ritual tomorrow morning, on the Isle of Faces."

"I could do the ritual in your place." Luna offered.

"Maybe you could and maybe you couldn't." He replied uncertainly. "Either way, I don't want you to. This is my mess to clean up, I should pay the price for it."

"What kind of price?"

"Let's not talk about that." Harry deflected. "Just enjoy the sunset with me."

"Okay." Luna gave in, seeing that he was set on his course. As long as he wasn't planning to die, then it would be fine.

XXXXX

15th day of the 6th moon, 296 AC. Riverlands, the Isle of Faces.

Harry had not performed a ritual like this since his early years, when he had been young and impatient in the pursuit of power. Back then, he had sacrificed blood, pain and the minor mutilation of his body in exchange for small enhancements.

In the process, he had also inadvertently sacrificed the chunk of Tom Riddle's soul lodged inside his head in exchange for great power. Not to mention nearly consigned himself to a fate worse than death.

Since then, he had vastly improved his knowledge of sacrificial rituals so that there would be no more blunders, but had never used them again. It was rarely worth it in the long run and only in the most absurd of circumstances would you ever regain what was lost.

He didn't have to do it. He could do as Adrastia sometimes still begged him to and abandon this world. He take Luna's offer to do it in his stead. He could do any number of things. Unfortunately, all of those were either worse than what he was planning now or would make it hard to live with himself in the future. There was no easy way out this time, no way to cheat the cost.

From a certain point of view, this could be considered a consequence of his youthful recklessness. If he hadn't performed those rituals in his youth, then R'hllor wouldn't have an entry point to his soul, he wouldn't have had to pull an Odin and he wouldn't have caused this mess by coming back and disturbing the natural order.

Funny how things worked out.

Harry took a deep breath and removed his clothes, then he knelt in seiza in the middle of the stone platform upon which the ritual circle was inscribed in his own blood. The position was uncomfortable, but he would need the stability it offered.

Technically, he could do this anywhere, but this was the place where he had briefly played at godhood. It would give the ritual more to work with.

Mediation came easy after so many years of practice. Deep breaths, clearing the mind, focus.

Letting his spirit slip into the Astral Plane, Harry opened his eyes, no longer seeing the physical world.

"Now, show me the Bloodstone Emperor." He whispered, words sending a ripple of intent through the Astral Plane. "Show me his life. All of his life, for all of my sight."

Back in the physical world, the blood comprising the ritual circle briefly glowed as the world accepted the proposed bargain.

XXXXX

Luna landed on the Isle of Faces with uncharacteristic nervousness, unsure of what she would find.

Harry should have returned by now.

Finding him wasn't hard – he was kneeling naked in front of the very tree that he'd once hung from. There was a layer of snow on his hair and shoulders, indicating that he'd been like that for quite some time already.

The blood from the ritual was already faded, so it was clearly over. Why was he still here?

Luna hurried towards his slumped form, worried that something had gone wrong.

"Harry?" She questioned gently, kneeling down in front of him and lifting his head. "Are you alright."

"I'm fine." He replied. "I know what to do now."

He didn't sound happy about it.

"Harry, look at me." She urged, when he kept his eyes closed.

He snorted, a sound of amusement that felt a little forced. "Can't do that."

"Why not?"

Harry finally opened his eyes and Luna reeled back in surprise. Instead of the brilliant green irises she loved and was used to, she was faced with a pair of blank white orbs.

"You know how it goes with sacrificial rituals." He sighed. "You have to give something to get something."

"Oh, Harry." Luna said mournfully. "You're only supposed to sacrifice one eye for knowledge, not both."

Harry chuckled, this time sounding more genuinely amused. "Unfortunately, sight isn't a divisible trait."

Oh, he hadn't sacrificed his eyes, he had sacrificed the concept of sight. That was much worse.

Luna decided to let it go. There was no use in dwelling on it.

"Come on, let's go home." She said, pulling him onto his feet. "You need a warm bath."

"Yeah, that sounds good." Harry agreed.

XXXXX

Omake – Game Night (idea supplied by Waki Paki)

"You have entered the door to the north. You are standing in a dark room. The pungent stench of mildew emanates from the wet dungeon walls." Harry narrated.

"What are these?" Tyrion called out from the kitchen, holding up a colorful plastic bag.

"Cheetos." Harry deadpanned, wondering at Luna's dedication to whatever script she had concocted inside her head.

Tyrion tried one and went wide-eyed at the taste. "Intriguing."

"I play a song on my lute." Oberyn declared.

"And what is this?" Tyrion interrupted again, holding up a plastic bottle.

"Mountain Dew." Harry replied, struggling mightily not to facepalm. Why did Luna think that Cheetos and Mountain Dew were requirements for playing Dungeons and Dragons? It had been centuries since those two things and others like them had passed, unmourned, into the annals of history.

"I play a song on my lute." Oberyn insisted.

"Why would you do that?" Willas asked, perplexed. "We are the only ones there."

"How do you open this?" Tyrion interrupted yet again.

"Twist the top counter-clockwise." Harry yelled back, regretting the sequence of events that had led to this moment. Why did he have to listen to his wife when she insisted that he and 'the boys' needed to spend more time together?

Right, because it was impossible to argue with her when she got an idea into her head. And because he hadn't wanted to see her pout in disappointment if he refused to go along with it.

"Now that we are alone in a dark room, I want to seduce my party members." Oberyn explained to Willas.

"Uncle!" Aegon protested.

"I am not your uncle, I am Oberon Greenhaze, the lusty elven bard." The Red Viper retorted with a grin, clearly having the most fun of the group.

Perhaps telling him that bards could seduce anything and everyone had been a bad idea.

"Well you can keep your lusts to yourself, because I am not getting seduced." Willas said firmly.

"You are if you fail a wisdom roll." Oberyn pointed out gleefully. "And I fear that your barbarian is not terribly wise."

"He has to roll a will save, and he's pretty good on that." Harry corrected.

"None may resist my charms." Oberyn insisted confidently.

"Where are the cups?" Tyrion called from the kitchen again.

"Just drink it straight from the bottle, there's no women here to complain."

"That seems uncouth." Willas commented.

"Your face is uncouth." Harry scoffed, making the heir of Highgarden stare at him in bafflement.

Oberyn burst into laughter.

"Father, that was rude." The overly responsible Aegon scolded before turning to the Reachman. "My apologies, Lord Willas."

"Cool your tits, boy." Harry chuckled at him. "The point of events like this is to do away with rank."

"Oh, I see." Aegon nodded pensively. "Is that why you told me not to invite Rhaenys? So as to not offend her with crude language?"

Harry knew that Aegon wished he could spend more time with his sister and had asked for her to be included in this, but it would have been a bad idea.

Aside from the usual problems of letting a woman into a group full of men, Rhaenys was old enough to still remember Rhaegar and had made it clear that she didn't want him to act as a father to her. Having her here and seeing her brother call him 'Father' would have just created a whole lot of unnecessary tension.

"That's right." Harry lied. "Now come on, finish up with this dungeon already."

"I play a song on my lute to seduce my party members." Oberyn piped up.

"For fuck's sake."